There are a slew of things for which I am thankful for daily.
Last weekend, I was reminded that I will always appreciate that Twitter and the FaceSpace were not around when I was a teenager.
I mentioned that to a friend at the office, and she said, "You would not have this job."
Jay GreesonAnother quickly added: "You may be in jail."
Everyone laughed in the moment. Later, I shuddered at the possibilities.
Think back to the days of your junior year in high school.
Yes, you're old enough to drive a car. Old enough to make lifetime memories and life-changing mistakes. Old enough to think you know everything and young enough to actually try to convince everyone that you do.
But for those of us over the age of 30, those highs and lows were shared over phone conversations and around lunch tables, not forever documented in the social media stratosphere, lingering in cyberspace waiting to reemerge during our 15 minutes of fame or some other high point in our life.
Take Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb, who Sunday was one strike from throwing a no-hitter. It was by all measures his best day as a professional, and he was met in the postgame news conference with questions about using the N-word and insensitive language about gay people on Twitter when he was 18 years old.
He apologized because he needed to. Hate speech is never acceptable, and we're sure that Newcomb, who is the third 20-something Major League Baseball player to face this type of painful social media history lesson, is truly remorseful.
This is all kinds of stupid. Newcomb's words, even as a teenager, were stupid. Every person with a modicum of fame not taking the time to scrub their social media accounts is stupid. Organizations dealing with individuals they market not taking every step to make sure those things do not happen again is stupid.
And arriving in a place where the first thing many reporters do as soon as someone hits the next level of fame is scour through their social media footprint to see if some teenager at some point in time said something stupid is also stupid.
Stupid. And sad.
Sad that we race to point fingers. Sad that the bashing of others is every bit America's pastime as baseball. Sad that, whether we realize it or not, the side story is too often the story.
Atlanta Braves starting pitcher Sean Newcomb sits on the bench after losing his bid for a no-hitter in the ninth inning of Sunday's game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at SunTrust Park.And sad that, according to a CBSNews.com poll, only 11 percent of those asked trust the mainstream media.
So here we are, wondering where the truly elite candidates for jobs that are tougher than ever are, and making sure no one famous every quoted a rap lyric or retold a joke that may have been offensive.
We're also in the same place that Sean Newcomb's teenage tweets are more outrageous than Sacha Baron Cohen making pedophilia the centerpiece of a gag on disgraced former Alabama politician Roy Moore.
And the exaggeration of issues like this only diminishes the true scrutiny that should be focused on issues such as the fact that white extremists are appearing on ballots in elections across the country.
That's wrong.
If memory serves, the main goal of teenage boys is finding ways to make teenage girls laugh.
Can that be in poor taste? Certainly.
Can that happen in ways that would embarrass any of us years later? You bet.
Can it be, shall we say, stupid? Uh, yes, yes it is.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343.